Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway billionare, has generated a wide-ranging discussion with his New York Times op-ed advocating that higher-income individuals, albeit people who make less than him, should pay more taxes. I have a better idea: why don’t we require Warren Buffett, and others like him, to give up their Medicare benefits?

In this time of fiscal disarray, when health care for the poor is a humanitarian catastrophe, there is no plausible justification for giving wealthy retirees government-subsidized health care. In 2010, we spent $524 billion on Medicare. In 2020, we’ll spend nearly a trillion. If we simply required that the wealthiest tenth of current Medicare beneficiaries pay for their own health care, taxpayers could save more than $700 billion from 2011-2020.

On the other hand, taxing carried interest as ordinary income—the tax-raising measure that Buffett advocates in his op-ed—would raise a measly $21.4 billion in revenue from 2012-2021, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

There’s a more fundamental reason why means-testing Medicare is better than raising taxes. Raising taxes hurts economic growth, whereas Medicare spending is expanding at a much faster rate than the economy. Hence, tax increases can never increase revenue as quickly as entitlement spending will go up. On the flip side, if you bend the infamous entitlement cost curve, while maintaining current tax rates, you give the economy a fighting chance to boost the Treasury’s coffers through economic growth.

I know that the Sage of Omaha is sagacious enough to understand this principle. So, Warren, how about it?